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Green Bay, Wisc.It’s a good time to be Reince Priebus. Beyond the obvious—that he’s from Wisconsin and the Green Bay Packers are once again a favorite to win the Super Bowl—the chairman of the Republican National Committee will spend much of his party’s convention week in Tampa collecting attaboys for his recent success: the dramatic turnaround of the RNC, the successful defense of Scott Walker’s recall challenge, the record-breaking pace of GOP fundraising, and the selection of Paul Ryan, a longtime friend and political ally, as Mitt Romney’s running mate.

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The 40-year-old has already gotten credit for the changes at the RNC and his role in helping to ensure Scott Walker remained Wisconsin’s governor. But even if Priebus had the least direct influence on the last of these—Paul Ryan’s joining the GOP ticket—it might well best represent the kind of change he has brought to his party.

Even through their success in the 2010 midterm elections, party leaders were wary of embracing entitlement reform. This is no longer true. Though the legion of strategists, pollsters, mail vendors, and media -consultants who run GOP campaigns counseled caution, Priebus urged his party to figure out how to run and win on the issues championed by his friend. At the debate before RNC members shortly before they elected him, Priebus was asked what it means to be a Republican and what the party should focus on. His response was telling: “We’re about to walk off a -fiscal cliff and I think the RNC chairman ought to take a chance and promote that conservative platform every chance they get to do it.”

Despite historic Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections, the RNC was a broken institution when Priebus took it over in mid-January 2011. The staff was demoralized. Bills were unpaid. Big donors were fuming.

More by Stephen F. Hayes

One year earlier, I sat across the table from a former Republican party chairman who explained in great detail that some of the GOP’s top contributors had never heard from Michael Steele, then the party chairman. His claim wasn’t that they hadn’t been coddled in the way that they’d been accustomed to, but that these contributors, including individuals who had previously made six-figure donations to the party, had not been contacted at all. Steele hated to make those calls.

Priebus doesn’t. He spends most of his time on the telephone with donors—he guesses 70 percent. At the committee meetings before the election that elevated him to chairman, Priebus sold himself as someone willing to do the unglamorous spadework required to rebuild the party. In a speech before he was elected, Priebus spoke of the importance of money. “The next chairman is going to be sitting in that office for five or six hours a day running through major donors lists,” he said. “That is going to be the big challenge—whether it be technology, whether it be get-out-the-vote, whether it be a 50-state strategy—it will all come down to money.”

It’s the blocking and tackling of modern American politics—it’s not glamorous but it needs to be done. The first part of Priebus’s two-step pitch is simple: He explains what’s at stake in the 2012 election. The second part is more complicated: He has to convince would-be donors that they should give their money to the RNC rather than to the growing number of outside groups involved in campaigns. The RNC, he explains, is the only entity that can coordinate with the presidential campaign, which ensures a consistent message.

When Priebus took over, there was talk, perhaps exaggerated, that the committee would not be able to make payroll, and the direct mail program was so overused that its benefits barely outweighed its costs. The RNC is now swimming in cash and seems to break records with each new campaign finance report. Some of this is happening because of the intense feelings people have about Barack Obama. But those feelings existed before Priebus took over and did not automatically translate into dollars.

The RNC has outraised the DNC every month in total individual contributions since March 2011—Priebus’s second full month in charge. In January 2011, the RNC had $2.1 million cash on hand and debt of $21.4 million. The DNC, by contrast, had $9.1 million cash on hand and was $16.8 million in debt. By July 2012, those numbers had changed dramatically. The RNC had $88.7 million in cash on hand and debt of $9.9 million; the DNC had cash on hand of $15.4 million and debt of $4.5 million. That’s a cash-on-hand advantage of some $73 million.

Regardless of what happens in November, Priebus will get credit for turning the RNC around. The more interesting part of his legacy is still an unknown. What will come of the Republican party’s embrace of entitlement reform and its elevation of Paul Ryan, the man who embodies it?